Two years have been completed of a three-year project investigating the patterns of comprehension breakdown that can result from focal damage to the brain. Preliminary results indicate that discrete components of language comprehension can be selectively affected by brain damage. One set of findings support the hypothesis that some types of naming deficits may be related to an actual disorganization of the patient's conceptual/semantic system. Other results implicate the selective disruption of patients' ability to combine several linguistic operations in the interpretation of sentences. A supplementary set case studies has been undertaken to investigate the correlates of syntactically based comprehension impairments in cases of Broca's and conduction aphasia.